At the beginning of May, I posted an article about Roman Catholicism and the search for – and lack of – the divine female in mainstream modern religion. I had one rather intriguing response from a gent in the comments section:

“Whilst I appreciate scholarly findings about the greater role of women in antiquity in religion and society I don’t like this trawling for crumbs of comfort. I would not want to bother looking for evidence of black people in the Bible in order to justify my right to be equal. Finding snippets of info to make better the whole rotten construct of the patriarchal religion. Far better to find a religion where women are the centre and power of thing and then find snippets of where men fit in. Then again better still not to have a religion at all.”

Which is valid, of course, but I think that there are more than just crumbs to find. There’s a goddess-shaped gap in our society. The contemporary worship of (mortal) women at places like Club Pedestal is a shameful secret for many men. Any fetish for powerful women is dismissed as merely a sexual perversion that must be kept secret from friends, family and colleagues. I’m not a religious person, but I know how much influence patriarchal religion continues to have on every society in the modern world. No matter how much we collectively ignore it, we continue to be affected by its values, and I feel that we’re not being told the whole story.

You see, so much of what we’re taught about religion, politics and social history has been written, recorded or unearthed by men. Our perception of the past is tainted by the personal interpretations of its translators and editors. At best, historical texts and artwork are more ambiguous than we realise and the conclusions reached by our educators – whether religious or secular – aren’t always as objective as they claim to be. As a result, we can’t assume that we’ve been told all the information.

If many of my teachers were to be believed, the majority of women didn’t do much except tempt men, weave tapestries and plop out the occasional male heir until some time in the ‘seventies when we suddenly developed coherent thought and set fire to our bras. Even the scant information we’re given about the worship of female deities is treated as something fluffy and frivolous. Women who, in all likelihood, held positions of religious and social authority in the ancient world have been reduced to creatures as patchy and degraded as the relics they have left behind.

Many people see the ritual adoration of Dominatrices as a way of countering this imbalance, albeit in a small and sometimes misguided way – whether it’s through kneeling at her feet, giving pleasure, or offering up your own sweet agony or humiliation as a sacrifice. I’ve been trying to find a way to put this into words lately but the founders of fetish site “Woman Worship” have beat me to it. So, on that note, to find a far more succinct version of what I’ve been trying to express (and where I nicked the image below from) click this link.

I will remain a non-smoker, despite all evidence to the contrary. However, having been a smoker for more of my life than I’ve been a non-smoker, it is difficult. We are conditioned to fetishise the cigarette. The more it comes to symbolise, the harder it is to escape it. Here’s part of a fascinating article from Bitch Magazine’s “Adventures in Feministory” about advertising agency tactics to associate smoking with female power:

‘By the mid-1920’s, cigarette smoking was popular among stylish young women, but it was by no means an acceptable behaviour. Smoking-As-Woman was still seen as a sign of “loose morals” in popular culture.

Enter Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, used his uncle’s theories of psychoanalysis and the principles of propaganda and applied them, for the first time, to business.

In 1929, Bernays was hired by American Tobacco Corporation President George Hill to find a way to convince women to pick up smoking. Hill wanted to lift the taboo of women smoking in order to, of course, sell more cigarettes. Bernays, in turn, hired psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, who told him that,

“Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis, and of male sexual power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women WOULD smoke, because then they would have their own penises.”

In order to accomplish this mission, Bernays organized a publicity stunt at New York’s Easter Parade. He got a group of young socialites together to march in the parade and dramatically light up cigarettes. He told the press that, “a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by light up what they called ‘torches of freedom'”. The story about the cigarette smoking débutantes was picked up by newspapers across the United States.

By appealing to women, the major advertising campaign that went along with Bernays’ public relations work had a tremendous impact on the sale of cigarettes; the number of cigarettes sold in the United States more than tripled between 1925 and 1930. By 1944, 36% of women smoked.

For women, smoking became more than just a fad. Smoking became a tangible symbol of women’s liberation, the result of a kind of corporate-sponsored feminism. Considering the curious linkage between feminism and smoking it comes at little surprise that, Virginia Slims, the first “women’s cigarette” brand, was introduced at the height of the second-wave feminist movement in 1968.

With the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby” Virginia Slims similarly appealed to women with the corporate concoction of pseudo-feminist rhetoric. Women, now smoking at the same rates as men, bought Virginia Slims in droves. A brand manager for Virginia Slims said this about the wildly successful advertising campaign:

“It was never strident, almost always tongue- in-cheek, and not feminist so much as liberationist, in the sense that the slogan really meant, ‘You’ve got a lot of options now.'”

Considering that today an estimated 23 million women smoke cigarettes in the US alone, indeed we have come a long way, baby.’

For the full article, click here.